Blog of a course that allows students to learn how to use books, newspapers, magazines, journals, archives, databases, and the Internet to find and evaluate information on legendary creatures such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other cryptids. It also encourages the developement of critical thinking skills to deal with extraordinary claims and ideas for thinking about them.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Nessie!

For this first post, I decided to look at the wikipedia article for the Loch Ness Monster, which is quite long and seems to be rife with some interesting books/articles/documentaries to look into. Even though references to a monster in the locality of Loch Ness seem to date back to the 6th century (in The Life of Saint Columba), the legend of "The Loch Ness Monster" start in the early 1930s and go forward.

I was surprised at the number of actual expeditions there have been over the years, and I think that will be a good subject/category to look for as I get further into my research. Obviously people who go on expeditions looking for Nessie (or who work for the Loch Ness Phenomena Information Bureau, which existed from 1962 to 1972) think she is real, and there are plenty of people jumping up to debunk their findings. This is great for the purposes of having a believer/skeptic stance in multiple types of media, one of the things I want to try and make sure to blog about.

Looking into the references and additional reading suggestions, there are a total of 128 references, some of which are duplicates or not totally relevant to the monster, 10 books, 1 documentary and six external links, and the wiki link to Loch Ness Monster in Popular Culture led me to at least one mockumentary and a british spoof comedy from 1986 that sounds too hilarious not to try and find on YouTube.

Finally, looking at the list of episodes of Monster Quest, there are multiple episodes that deal directly with Nessie or other lake monsters, so I will be watching those as well. And I've figured out the best shirt to wear for my presentation:

(It's a threadless shirt. You can buy it here but they're sold out right now.)